Good morning. This is our fifth class on chinuch. I think we could finally get down to more details and specifics. Today, I want to go over terminologies that we’re going to be using in the future, B'ezrat Hashem (with Hashem's help). These terminologies are very important for us to memorize and know.
Basically, we spoke about the basics of chinuch in the past few classes. First, the goal of chinuch is to inculcate our children, to get them to want to do the right thing and choose the right things in life. Not just to actually do, but to want to do. We explained that there’s a difference between the two. There’s a difference between control and chinuch. Control means I’m controlling the situation. I’m using different methods to get what I want at the moment, to get my children to behave in a certain way at the moment.
Chinuch has nothing to do with control. You might need control. We’re going to explain more as we go on about how control and chinuch work together. But those are terminologies we have to understand. Whenever we say the word control, it means we’re trying to control the situation right now. We’re trying to control the behavior, to control the action by different means. It could be consequences, rewards, screaming sometimes, or whatever it is that we’re doing to get control.
But chinuch is about things that will have long-term effects on our children. It’s going to inspire them to want to do the right thing and have the right values. So chinuch aims to create internalization. This is the word. Internalization means we want our children to internalize the values, the right things we want for them. Whether it’s, again, emunah (faith), honesty, love of Torah, loving Hashem, loving mitzvot (commandments), or wanting to be giving people, all those things that we try very hard to give over to our children, we want them to internalize.
If we’re working only on control and we’re not implementing chinuch, and we’re not aiming to get to the final level, then control not only doesn’t have a lasting effect; many times, if you’re just involved in control, you’re going to have the exact opposite of what you want in the future. It’s going to do damage. At best, our kids will come out like robots. They’ll be robotic, but it’s not in them. Those feelings, the feelings of wanting to do the right things, are not internalized.
So how do we create internalization? How do we get our children to really internalize the right things, the right values? How do we do that? Here comes another word. I don’t know if we’ve spoken about this in the past, but this word is called association. Association means that a big part of our children internalizing what we’re giving them over depends on whether they have a positive association or a negative association. I’m going to explain those two things. Have we spoken about association yet? Okay. I said this mashal (parable) in the past. I don’t know if I said it here, but in other places, the Alter of Novardok spoke about a certain form of entertainment that was popular at the time. It was called the dancing bears.
They used to be traveling gypsies. They would take the bears and put on a show everywhere they went. They would make money. What was the show? They had bears. They put them in a cage, and when they played certain music, the bears started to dance. It was a big spectacle, right? People came. It was the best form of entertainment, probably better than the Super Bowl, right? Everyone wanted to see the dancing bears, and they would make money like that.
People were wondering, how do you get bears to dance? It’s an amazing thing: get bears to dance, play music, and the bears start to dance. When they looked into it, they found out that these trainers would take the bears when they were little cubs, right after they were born, and put them in a cage with hot coals on the bottom. The bears would step on the coals, and as they did, they would jump all over the place from pain. While they were doing this, the trainers played certain music. Given enough time, the bear starts to associate the pain with the music. At a certain point, you can take out the hot coals and play the music, and it will automatically trigger in the bear the feeling of pain it experienced. Because it doesn’t know music and pain as separate things. It associates them together. To the bear, they were always the same thing. So you can get to a certain point where you remove the hot coals, and the bear is still feeling the pain.
So it’s not dancing because it’s just used to dancing when it hears music. When they studied this further, they found that when they play the music, it actually stimulates in the bear’s brain the feeling of pain it had when it was hearing that music. So this was a form of entertainment. It was really a cruel kind of thing they did to the animals. This is the concept of associating. It’s an unbelievable thing. You can get to a place where, for some reason, even us as human beings, who understand the difference, can emotionally have certain associations or feelings from when we were involved in something. Automatically, those feelings will be triggered whenever we’re involved in that thing.
Sometimes you can hear a song, right, and you’re like, “Oh my God, I’m so excited.” It brings you back to a certain time in your life when you were going through something, and you’re like, “That song triggers those emotions again.” That’s a very light level of association.
I want to read you a letter that a young man wrote. Again, this is regarding learning Gemara. We have to take this and apply it to our boys and our girls; this could apply in many areas. This young man is writing the following letter to bring out this point. This is called negative association. This is going to be positive association. But the word association is a very important keyword here, because it’s going to be the actual step that creates internalization. Chinuch is internalization. How do we create internalization? By means of positive association.
So we’re going to have positive association and negative association. I’m going to read you the following letter: “I can never forgive because I can never forget. And I can never forget because it isn’t just something from the past; it’s happening today, every day. It’s become a part of who I am. It is with me all the time, and it makes my life hopeless and depressing. I literally can’t look at a Gemara.” This is talking about a young man who’s expected to be sitting and learning in Yeshiva all day. All you do all day is learn Gemara, and many boys have to go through this. But this is actually expressing his feelings.
“This is, by the way, a real letter from a real person. These are not made up. Maybe it’s in detail. Details are changed just to not give away the identity of certain people. But these are real things. When I open a Gemara, I can literally feel my tutor’s pinches, put-downs, and the suffocating feeling. I don’t know if you’ll understand, but I don’t just mean to say that I remember what he did to me. I mean to say that I feel what he is doing to me now. It’s like it’s happening every time again. I know that it’s the tutor and not the Gemara.” And here’s the key: the guy today is old enough to understand that the Gemara didn’t do anything wrong to him. It was the tutor who taught him the Gemara. “I know that it’s the tutor and not the Gemara. He seemed to think that my parents hired him to make me hate Gemara and distance me from learning. Fine, so I understand that it’s him, not the Gemara. But that makes no difference. The fact is that I can’t bring myself to participate even in a Daf Yomi shiur (Torah lecture). Just to sit down and hear a daf. I can’t. I’m done with learning. I will not forgive him for the rest of my life. And certainly not at the entrance to Gehinam (Hell). He sent me there. How and why should I forgive him?”
Okay, this is a real letter. What does this show you? We’re talking about a kid who had a tutor. The parents hired a tutor. They paid money: “Come, please teach my son Gemara.” This tutor was abusive to the child, verbally, physically, whatever it was. He pinched him. He put him down. That created, at a time when the child was young and couldn’t actually express it, this suffocating feeling. This is called negative association.
Now this person goes on to be an adult. He’s trying to learn Gemara, and he just can’t. The connection is between feelings of pain, sometimes humiliation, right? Your daughter could be asked to take part in a school play. Now she goes up there and messes up her part. What feelings is she going to associate with stepping up to do something in life? It depends on what the reaction was. If she was humiliated, if she felt put down, it’s going to automatically make it that now I’m never doing that again, right? Because every time she tries to do that, those feelings are going to come back.
So the rabbi here is saying it has nothing even to do with intellect. Structurally, you can understand that the two things are not connected. But once the two things are tied together emotionally, he says anyone in the field knows of many cases where the negative association is so pronounced, so strong, that the child seems incapable of overcoming the negative attitude that has become ingrained in him. It’s simply beyond their control. And this could be going on throughout adulthood as well. This is the power of association. Negative association. Negative association is some sort of thing that happened when they were children that gave them this feeling, and now they can’t rid themselves of it.
You know, some boys experience this when they open a chumash (Five Books of Moses) or a siddur (prayer book). It happens to girls as well. Anything associated with spirituality or prayer could be suffocating to them, and they don’t even know why. They have to go through therapy. They have to start talking: “Oh, when I was younger my parents did this and my teacher did that.” And teachers play a big role in this. My gosh, a teacher could literally destroy a child forever. They could, with one word, with one action they do. This is real stuff that goes on every single day. We deal with this all the time.
“Elementary school, my rebbe (Torah teacher) did this to me.” Okay, so because of that, what? I had this just yesterday. I was talking to a boy in high school. There was something going on in the class, and it shouldn’t be happening. He was getting pulled. When I had him in my office, I said, “So why didn’t you come talk to me about it?” He told me, “I can’t trust rabbis.” “Why not?” “Because when I was in elementary school, in fourth grade, I told my rebbe something, and he promised he wasn’t going to tell anybody. Then the next day my parents came to me and said, ‘Why are you doing this and this?’” So he lost trust. It happens every day. These things are associations, how we associate.
So that’s negative association. What’s positive association? How do we create positive association? The only way we’re going to actually let the chinuch become part of our children is if they associate the good things with positive feelings. So positive association is actually the key to everything. It could be that they had a certain teacher who, when they looked at that teacher, was just smiling, warm, and loving. So it created this kind of positive association with the subject they were teaching. It could be a rebbe who was just happy, and it made the child want to be like that. He wanted to be, “Oh, I want to learn also,” because it just brings up a kind of warm feeling whenever I think of that rebbe.
That happened to me, actually. I had one rebbe who, I would say, had the most influence on me just by being who he was, by the way he carried himself and the way he learned. It created this kind of association for me: this is what I want. This is how I also want to be happy when I learn Gemara. This happens every day.
I’m going to give you just a few examples of what positive association can be. To put it in one sentence, positive association is what causes the child to laugh, to like, and to be attracted to good behavior. So when the child knows that when they’re doing the good behavior, they’re actually feeling a positive association with that behavior, it makes the child want internally to do that positive behavior. So this is the goal.
In our homes, we have to ask ourselves: we’re trying to teach our children, we’re trying to plant those seeds like we said. What are we going to be doing to make sure those seeds are actually being internalized and are going to bring fruit? Are you making it a positive association? Is the atmosphere in your house pleasant? Is it joyous? This is the number one thing. First of all, as we’ve spoken about, having a pleasant home is the number one factor. The love in the house is the number one factor creating a positive association with anything you’re trying to teach your children.
They did a study. Rav Wolbe brings it down. I think a big biologist did this study. He doesn’t mention his name. But he says, why is it that in the animal world, once an animal is born, within a few hours—or, for some animals, a few days, and for some, a few weeks—it’s ready? The animal is already very independent and can do things that it takes a human child sometimes a year or two to do.
So he came out with this theory: really, a child is supposed to be developing still in the mother for another year. He called it the second part of the child’s pregnancy. Very interesting. Because children—because humans are social beings—Hashem made it so that part of the pregnancy is actually the mother carrying him, and the second part of the pregnancy, part of his development, is the year or two after he’s born, when he’s going to learn how to socially interact with his sisters, his brothers, his parents. This is integral for him, because an animal is not a social being. An animal, once it’s born, learns how to do certain things and can survive on its own. A child, a human, needs that.
He calls it the social womb. There’s the physical womb, and then there’s the social womb. That takes a year or two for the child to actually get to walk and start talking, to become independent. The same things that take an animal a few days can take a child a year or two. It’s made that way because that’s part of his development.
Development starts when we’re talking about infants and newborns. They’re learning all the time: the expressions, the way you hug them, everything. This is what’s building them.
They did a study, I think, where children were born and given up to orphanages or shelters. They followed those children throughout. Even though they were cared for and not abused, just the fact that they didn’t have that atmosphere meant that in life they came out to be, I don’t know, less successful, with more chance of suicide and more chance of drugs. Just because when they were newborns, in the first few years of their lives, they were cared for by someone other than their own family. So that’s a real thing that has effects in life. That’s one. The first thing about positive association is the warm house.
The second thing is encouragement. Do we encourage our children? Do we compliment our children? This is a big key: complimenting. Whenever your child does something that you want them to learn how to internalize, you have to compliment them. If you compliment them and make a big deal out of it, the child feels good. Once the child feels good, it’s becoming internal. They’re taking it in. Now they’re going to want to behave like this because you gave them a good feeling, a positive association with the positive behavior. It’s a very simple formula.
When they do something good, make sure to point it out. When your husband comes home: “Wow, you don’t know what she did today. You don’t know how unbelievable she is. She helped. She did this. She did that.” Make it a big deal. She made a Beracha (blessing). It’s so beautiful. Make a big deal out of it.
The other day, my older daughter took my younger daughter to Amazing Savings. My younger daughter is very into makeup. She likes makeup. So she bought all kinds of lip gloss. She came home, and I came home by dinner. She was showing it to me, all excited about it: “Look what I got.” I was looking at it. It was all flavored. I was reading the ingredients, and there was a lot of stuff in there. I knew it wasn’t kosher. So I said, “Deborah, I don’t think this is kosher.” She was looking at me like she didn’t want to part with it. It was very hard. But we spoke about it a little bit. Maybe she could give it to the help that comes to the house. So we put it in a nice bag, and she made a little card.
For the next two to three days, all I talked about was how unbelievable Deborah is. “How unbelievable! Hashem is so proud. The Malachim (angels) are singing right now, Deborah! Wow, because it’s not kosher, she gave it away.” Then we’re going to go to the store, and I’m going to get her something just as good that’s kosher. You’ve got to make it a positive experience. So she feels good. She’s smiling, she’s walking. “Oh, she can’t wait to give it. She can’t wait to give it away.” All of a sudden, right?
Also, there are certain things that are hard for our children to do. So we’ve got to compensate. Compensation is also part of positive association. If you know your child is having a hard time doing something, but you still want them to do it and you’re still expecting them to do it and go through with it, you’ve got to make sure to compensate for it. Like I just said, you have to compensate. She gave up her lip gloss because it wasn’t kosher. Now we’ve got to compensate. How do we compensate? Compliments, for sure, but you’ve got to compensate. You’ve got to go and buy her something else. This is very, very simple: positive association.
And here, I think the mothers play a bigger role than the fathers. In last week’s parasha, the pasuk (verse) says that when Hashem was giving the Torah to Klal Yisrael, he tells Moshe Rabbeinu, “Go tell Beit Yaakov, and then tell Bnei Yisrael.” And Rashi brings down: “Beit Yaakov”—these are the women. The question is, why do women come before men?
The Mefarshim (commentators), Rav Moshe Feinstein and others, explain it. He says it beautifully. Rav Moshe Feinstein says that we’re dealing here with giving the Torah. That means we’re coming to ensure the continuity of the Torah in Klal Yisrael. Those who played the biggest role in that are the ladies. Why is that? You would think the father is the one who learns. The father is the one who goes to shul (synagogue). The father is the one who sets the spiritual tone in the house. So why are we talking to the ladies first? Rav Moshe Feinstein says it beautifully: since the ladies are the ones primarily giving the love and care to the child all the time, right? They’re the ones feeding, bathing, doing everything for the child. So they’re the ones who have the actual key to the child’s spirituality.
Rav Moshe Feinstein says the father could come, you could send them to school, they could go to a Rebbe, and the Rebbe could lecture, but he says the child is not interested. The mother, who’s the one providing that love and warmth and positive association, is the one who holds the keys. Motivated children come from the mother. I’m telling you a secret here: motivation, Ratzon. You can’t create Ratzon. You send your son to school. The Rebbe is not. The Mora is not going to be able to create Ratzon in your child. The only one who’s going to create Ratzon—when I say Ratzon, it means the want to succeed, the want to do, to do good—that’s at home. And at home, it’s primarily the Beit Yaakov. Those are the mothers, because your child trusts you. Why does she trust you? Because you’re giving her everything. You’re the one giving her her nourishment, her food. All her Gashmiut (material needs) is coming from you. So you’re in a position to also cultivate the Ruchniut part: the values, the spirituality. That’s why Beit Yaakov comes first. That’s what Moshe Feinstein says.
The father comes home. Yeah, you know how fathers are: we come home at night, maybe kiss them goodnight, whatever. We buy them toys. We give them the money. But at the end of the day, the mothers are doing everything for them. So they associate that warmth and love of a mother with everything else the mother is trying to give over. So if the mother talks about certain things, about what’s important, that motivates the children. That’s what they want, because you have that key, that key of motivation.
So these are terminologies. I think now we’re ready to move on. But are these things clear? Chinuch, we’re already learning, is internalization. Internalization is to become part. That I should want to do the right things. Gam ki yazkin, lo yasur mimena (Even when he grows old, he will not depart from it.). The way to have proper internalization is through positive association. Negative association is going to create negative feelings, negative outcomes. Positive association comes from compliments. It comes from warmth, love, caring. It comes from encouragement. It comes from compensation. All that stuff is going to give the child a positive association with doing the right things. And when they feel that positive association, they’ll want to become like that. They’ll want to do what you gave them, what you planted in them.
Respecting the child is very important. I think we miss this sometimes. We think children because they're young. You have to understand your child and their world. Their emotional world is like you and your emotional world. You disrespect your child, it hurts, and it does something. It does something.
Last week’s parasha: Yitro comes to Moshe. Yitro is the father-in-law. He’s coming to join the Jewish people. The pasuk says that one day after he comes, he gives Moshe criticism. What does he criticize Moshe about? He’s a foreigner, coming from a foreign land. He comes to join Klal Yisrael. Moshe Rabbeinu is sitting, it says in the pasuk, he’s sitting and judging the people. “V'chol ha'am omed.” They’re all standing. Moshe Rabbeinu is sitting. It’s an unbelievable thing. So Yitro tells Moshe, “Why are you doing this to the people? You’re belittling their kavod (honor). You’re being mezalzel (disrespecting) in their kavod. They have to stand and wait for you all day because you’re the only judge, while you’re sitting. It’s not the proper thing to do. You should appoint more judges.” And the question is, Moshe obviously made a calculation that it was more...